NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and the Ministry of Civil Aviation on a plea by a 72-year-old woman, who was urinated upon in a New York- Delhi Air India flight last November allegedly by an inebriated passenger, seeking directions to the DGCA and all airlines to frame mandatory SOP and zero tolerance rules to deal with unruly passengers on board.
A bench of CJI DY Chandrachud, Justices PS Narasimha and JB Pardiwala issued the notice to DGCA and the Ministry of Civil Aviation.
It was argued in the plea that DGCA has no policy with respect to how much alcohol can be served on Indian carriers internationally. Serving and consumption of alcohol are banned on domestic Indian flights, although it is freely available at airport bars and restaurants.
Thus along with an SOP, she had also sought for directing the centre & DGCA to set guidelines on alcohol policy on international flights of Indian carriers to protect passengers and airline staff, including setting limits on alcohol served, without any discrimination based on the class of travel.
“DGCA deals with such incidents on a “case to case” basis and is therefore inconsistent in the actions that they take against such airlines. The notion that a person committing such crimes can go free without attracting any penal charges also shows that passengers are not made aware of the guidelines.
In the present case, the Petitioner was coerced into reaching a settlement with the urinating passenger, when flight staff should have respected the Petitioner’s request to be kept away from the perpetrator and followed their obligation to report the matter to law enforcement officials. This is evidence that airlines’ standard operating procedures for dealing with unruly/disruptive behaviour may be insufficient and/or insufficiently enforced,” the plea stated.